I'm thankful we're not in Mumbai.

but I do think that the 'aim of terror is terror' is irrelevant.  That's true for gangs trying to control a neighborhood, drug cartels trying to control supply and demand.  With those elements, the individual has some idea what the goals of the criminal group are.  With 'terrorists' the goal is - for people to be afraid.  In my view, wandering around in fear is what idiots do.  This is why we have Pres Chimpy in a dither for 8 years and our legislature happy to pass any anti-constitutional law that comes across their desks, such as the Patriot act or FISA.

Actual leaders aren't cowed by criminal thugs, but of course those have been in short supply in the US, due to how we elect people based on their American Idol-type ability to be popular.  Effectiveness?  Meh.

Back to passage of the Patriot Act and FISA and similar legislation - it's more convenient for large corporations and protects them from legal remedy.  That's the real goal - which they could easily scare into being, with the help of Homeland Security orange alerts.  Somehow, I have a lot of trouble believing that the beneficiaries of those laws were afraid of anything but losing money, not sleep or peace of mind.

Also, I see the rise of Islamic terrorism and the demise of the USSR as coincidental, not causal.  I don't think the Russkys were/are doing anything to keep terrorism at bay.  We cooked up this mess all by our lonesomes - we didn't need any help.

I'm also amused by this 'they' who hate freedom of choice.  Oddly, this sounds like the same 'they' who are keeping Americans from choices in healthcare, alternative energy, atheism (freedom from religion, in that case), transportation, etc.  I see this 'they' as the current corporate megabillionaires who want to stay in power in the US.  How are they different from Muslim Imams who want to stay in power?  Not much, IMHO.

This is why I find it really hard to objectify and distance from these 'terrorist' people.  The world over, people are the same.  We pretend we can't understand 'them' or that their crimes are special so that we can villify them into monsters and easier kill them or annihilate their culture.  This is why I don't want to go there.  I see this 'terrorist' behavior as essentially criminal in nature.  To combat it, neutralize the causes and the support.  It was done before in the US with the KKK.  We can do it again, but it's going to take international effort this time.

It's very hard for me to read long articles like that one since I'm dyslexic. The only way I can do it is by reading

to my wife or getting the computer to read it to me. One of the key excerpts:

Generation Y, particularly its “racism” obsessed women, might have been named as well for that portion of their buttocks showing between the low-slung jeans and the dorsal tattoo. Superficial differences notwithstanding, their aggressive stupidity, lockstep thinking, shallow conformism, and boundless enthusiasm for The One are portrayed most convincingly in a documentary film, Triumph of the Will, made in another country, in another era: Germany, 1934.

Our people have been snatched and they will not return to normal, ever. Except after a catastrophe, which is the probable end of Body Snatcher society through a confluence of economic, energy depletion, demographic, and jihadi scenarios. All catalyzed further through the Idiocracy factor, with the West’s population degenerating continuously with respect to intelligence, learning, use of language, culture, values, discernment of the good, the true, even the useful.

We will not be able to prevent that catastrophe; we can only learn how to survive it and emerge stronger, and serve then as a core model for the disoriented, shell-shocked multitude of the Pods.

Bottom line: lots of voters voted against their own best interests but were unaware they were doing so.

I could get me a little fishing lodge or maybe the job of blogger in chief for the PUMA Immigrant Diaspora Society Of Alaska (PISDOFA)